Amanda Seyfried says she spent much of the pandemic learning Joni Mitchell’s Blue from top to bottom — on guitar, dulcimer and piano — only to watch the film she’d been preparing for quietly fall apart.
Seyfried told reporters that she worked through the album until the final track, “[The Last Time I Saw] Richard,” and that the moment she finished she broke down in tears. She described the achievement as a personal milestone: after finishing the record she felt like a real musician and said the work had given her a sense of having planted her flag on the summit.
The preparation was exacting. In addition to Blue, Seyfried learned Mitchell standards such as “Both Sides Now” and “The Circle Game.” She has performed Mitchell’s music publicly — notably a cover of “California” on The Tonight Show that went viral in March 2025 — but she has made clear that the television performance was not an audition for another project.
Part of Seyfried’s prep was also private and intimate. She met Mitchell at the singer’s Los Angeles home, where Mitchell invited her in for a steak dinner and they listened to Blue together. Seyfried said Mitchell remarked on the album’s sparseness during their evening, an observation Seyfried took as an affirmation of the record’s power.
The film Seyfried was attached to was intended to focus on Mitchell and her longtime manager Elliot Roberts, who died in 2019; Seyfried has described the project in simple terms — a movie about Mitchell and Roberts — and then watched it be shelved. After that decision, another Joni Mitchell biopic moved forward under director Cameron Crowe. Reports now point to Meryl Streep and Anya Taylor-Joy portraying older and younger versions of Mitchell in Crowe’s film.
That chain of events creates an obvious friction: Seyfried invested months of pandemic isolation mastering an entire canonical album and building a private, musician-level relationship with the material, but the public, big-budget biography she readied herself for was not the film that reached production. Seyfried has said she is “very, very much aged-out” of playing a young Mitchell in Crowe’s version and reiterated that her Tonight Show performance wasn’t an audition for that project.
What happens next is now largely out of Seyfried’s hands. Cameron Crowe’s biopic is the confirmed Joni Mitchell project moving toward audiences, with Meryl Streep attached to play Mitchell’s later years and reports naming Anya Taylor-Joy for younger scenes. Seyfried’s intense musical preparation, meanwhile, exists as its own record: a pandemic-era accomplishment she says changed how she sees herself as an artist, even if it will not be seen as part of the shelved film.
The unanswered practical question — why the Seyfried-led biopic was abandoned — remains. For now, the next public moment in Mitchell on-screen will likely be Crowe’s film, while Seyfried’s work with Mitchell’s songs survives in performances and the private memory of an artist who learned an iconic album by heart and, in her words, wept when she reached the end.
